Feb 5, 2020
Why I Wake Up at 5 AM Wherever I Am
Friends, colleagues, and even strangers tell me how crazy I am to wake up so early in the morning.
They ask me the same question you’re probably asking me right now:
Why do you wake up so early in the morning?
The story of how this all started was when Toby (the family cat) meowed every single morning exactly at 5. No later nor earlier.
He would scream this bolt of I WANT MY FOOD NOW. I WON’T STOP UNTIL SOMEONE GIVES ME FOOD.
So ever since then, I’ve been waking up at 5 Eastern Standard Time.
Whenever I arrived in Europe, I thought this would change and I would somehow settle and wake up at a decent time, but it didn’t.
There was no cat meowing his heart out for food, but my mind getting used to the time zone and my body following my mind.
After waking up at this time for the past years, I found the benefits of it and why I still continue doing it to this day. Maybe you’d find them beneficial for yourself too.
There’s More Time in the Day For Me to Feel Productive
24 hours in a day isn’t much when there’s so much I need or want to do.
Whether it’s working an 8–3 job with additional private tutoring on the side (which I did for a year and a half while living and working as an English teacher in the Czech Republic), wanting to stay in bed to complete my 20 books of that year on GoodReads early, venture out in wherever I am to explore all of what that place can offer, or even catching up on sleep I haven’t gotten the chance to all week are things I obviously cannot do all in one day.
Call me ambitious, but there are times that I really want to tick off a lot of things so waking up early to complete at least more than 2 things on my list gives me the reason to wake up before the birds do.
This Is My Time of Meditation
Meditation comes in all different ways and I’ve discovered that my meditation takes place at this place. I’ve already made the bed, washed up, made a cup of coffee while getting ready for the day, and then sitting on top of the window sill to look out the window and letting go of anything I was thinking about the evening before.
Whenever stress or anxiety falls heavily upon me, looking up to the sky makes me feel incredibly relieved.
There will be some people who would say that the sky makes them feel insignificant because it’s so vast and wide, I say that it makes me feel free and that the vast and wideness of it gives me the reason to believe that anything is fully possible.
So at 5 in the morning, I look out to the sky and feel hopeful at that very moment.
I’ve Created a Time I Mentally Have All On My Own
Because many of us don’t either have to or want to wake up so early in the morning, I take this time to call it my own.
People have a favorite coffee spot that they enjoy going every morning or a favorite spot where they go for a glass of wine or beer after a hard week of work — they claim these places as “theirs”. I do the same with 5 in the morning.
This is the time where I somehow feel special and intimate because I’m spending it entirely on my own. Everyone is either asleep or busy getting ready to go to work or school and I’m awake meditating and taking it slow at that very moment.
Waking up early has also been helping me during this time of unemployment.
Yes, I know there’s no reason to wake up so early but having this routine in mind and keeping it diligent during a time I feel extremely hopeless help.
Like the saying goes in German — Morgenstund hat Gold im Mund.
The early bird catches the worm.
